Archive for the ‘zeitgeist und weltanschauung’ Category

I’m using this platform as an archive for a conversation with Kayla. A PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne; who’s doing urban mapping or in her own words:

The course I’m doing is under School of Arch & Design. My main background is Landscape Architecture and for the PhD, I look into temporary markets. I would say it’s a mix of landscape architecture + urban/city + and “the everyday” things that go in between. And yes, I’ve never thought maps and mapping could be this fascinating too. It’s amazing to see a place/city differently once they are mapped in different ways.

She’s also the sister of Nadirah who’s a photographer in New York, whom I met last month at the Work Presentation session at The Republik Studio. I still owe her the editing of last bootleg video.

Now I’m committing my passion for time-lapse with another passion of mine: infographics.

My Del.icio.us account is populated with the infographics, information visualization, information design, infosthetics, statistics and timeline analysis. I’m used to bookmark tag with Del.icio.us, now I’m in semi-comatose mode ever since the news of Yahoo going to shutdown Del.icio.us. There’s even category for del.icio.us that I use in this blog with the help of xmlrpc.php.

Before I knew of Kayla work. I’m already set off on cataloguing the urbanscape of the city and the littoral space of my hometown — demarcated space of white sand and the blue sea, with sparkling stars above.

Her work on urban mapping is a great interest of mine, as the work-in-progress that I do for month long personal project of mine, involves with night market/temporary market (pasar malam) in urban city.

It’s an exciting notion that my work could be used for someone in their intellectual pursuit in the academia world of urban planning.

I’m pretty much an accomplished motion-control time-lapse photographer/videographer, but I need help with visualizing the soundscapes of the city into some form of waveform infographics.

The visual and interface design of Mark Coleran is the best place to start for inspiration. The time-lapse footage with the visualisation of soundscape, time countdown and sun dial would be an exquisite final product.

Mark Coleran: Domino

Mark Coleran: Domino

Mark Coleran: Mission Impossible 3

Mark Coleran: Mission Impossible 3

Mark Coleran: Mee-Shee: The Water Giant

Mark Coleran: Mee-Shee: The Water Giant

Mark Coleran: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mark Coleran: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mark Coleran: The Island

Mark Coleran: The Island

Lovely interface design, but I’m looking for more simplistic interface.

I just realised that my personal project on urban time-lapse with the Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system have greater impact in urbanscape mapping not just in time-lapsing per se.

What’s the traffic condition, the flow of pedestrians & vehicles, the light pollution source, the hygiene indicator, the environment controller & the of course the aesthetic aspect of the light play itself on low shutter speed.

I’m doing personal motion control time-lapse with Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system at Cheras’ (or M’sia even) longest night market, every Wednesday at Taman Connaught. This is called urban mapping?

I just realised that my personal project on urban time-lapse with the Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system have greater impact in urbanscape mapping not just in time-lapsing per se.

What’s the traffic condition, the flow of pedestrians & vehicles, the light pollution source, the hygiene indicator, the environment controller & the of course the aesthetic aspect of the light play itself on low shutter speed.

All this from a simple time-lapse. Wow.

Yes, I would say time-lapse photograph can be a kind of mapping when we specifically know what we want to document, or “reveal”. And the best part, sometimes what we find stuff that we did not expect.

In the Lorong TAR Night Market project, I wanted to understand how the back lane is occupied across time, just like you posted: changes in how the space is utilized, flow of pedestrians & vehicles, etc. We did the same for Petaling Street and it’s amazing to see how vendors bring in their kit-of-parts to set up night stalls in the middle of the street market. It almost seemed like a choreography of some kind: they come in, they install, they vend, people come. When the market closed, they uninstall, they go out, and by midnight, the garbage collection service comes and cleans the street. By morning, everything was back to normal.

For my project, we had to do the shooting manually every half hour to every hour (thanks to my husband for shooting most of it!). If you want to shoot Lorong TAR, start shooting from the morning because the vendors start setting up their stalls as early as 10 or 11 am (we only started in the afternoon and by that time the lane was pretty much filled with tents already). And yeah, Taman Connaught Night Market is definitely the longest night market – stretching about 1km if I’m not mistaken! If you have time-lapse photos of this, hope you won’t mind sharing with me. Would love to see how the super-long night market becomes a pop-up city over the night!

By the way, I recently found some works by Olafur Eliasson that also uses time-lapse.

I would love to. I’ll be more “industrious” with my time-lapse editing this upcoming month. I’m juggling between two jobs, offshore engineering & cinematography, and time-lapse as my past-time passion.

Check my flickr and Tom Lowe’s Timescapes.org for the kind of work that I’m doing. For the flickr there’s only one time-lapse video. I’m not much a zealous uploader. I will soon, in my Vimeo account.

Thanks for the pointer. I’m cataloging a couple of night market. Taman Connaught is the hardest due to the length. And I could only make one time-lapse per week, with different perspective (usually on the elevated pathway).

I’ll try to post one of the perspective soon.

Thanks for sharing your thought. I’m very keen in architecture, urban planning and design too. I hope the time-lapse work that I done could show something about the need for better gentrification project for the Malaysian community.

The data was sourced from the city council. As in the previous map, each colour represents each day. In this map, the tallest bar represents the highest number of stalls, which marks the largest or longest night market. Now that I’m taking a second look at this, Pasar Malam Taman Sri Petaling on Tuesday nights actually has 900 stalls – marked by the tallest blue bar. Pasar Malam Taman Connaught comes in second with 702 stalls. Now that we’ve seen temporary markets as an amazing phenomenon in the country, we should be able to anticipate this in our future city planning (read: phd contribution, hopefully!)

Sri Petaling (Tuesday) is near my Oil & Gas office. Taman Connaught (Wednesday) is near my apartment. The infographics and the statistics are useful in order to get the best of the time-lapse exposure. The larger the traffic, the better the flow of the time-lapse can be captured.

I agreed with the urban planning to redesign more public space i.e. temporary markets and gardens for the community. We’re choked with the concrete and the asphalt, we forget how lush the empty space are.

Now I know what I’m looking forward to this week. That, and all the the delayed editing of past videography work, and one of them is the bootleg video of your New Yorker sister last Work Presentation at The Republik. The one I uploaded at the youtube is a raw file. Grainy — should have use faster prime lens. Oh, well.

Cheers!

+++

Last night I was at the Vincent Moon & Efterklang, An Island screening at Eightyfourcube Studio. Even though it’s an acoustic short film yet soundscape of the landscape plays a vital part in the film.

Since I’ll be at the place for hours. I might as well capture the soundscape of the place and translated it into infographics of peak wave form.

There’ll be mash of time-lapse and wave-form graph. Like some wicked sci-fi movie. Hahaha. I’m just being optimistic. Is there an apps for capturing the waveform into infographics other than me just print screen the Final Cut Pro’s sound bar?

I cut it off during the embedded heckler intervention — nice touch to the skit. Shame I didn’t record it until the end.

I got a problem uploading HD file on youtube and vimeo only have 500 MB limit per week. I try to reduce the 1080p to 640, but it got blocky artifacts even with 5000 bit rate. Exporting to 720p turns out decent.

This is the continuation of the previous entry. WordPress somehow refused to separate two gallery of different event — so here’s the second entry.

Cloth & Clef

Whenever Cloth & Clef comes to mind. The imagery of clef symbol that is created in my mind usually a different symbolism referred to James Clavell’s Shogun.

The clef musical symbol — or tauge as my roommate, back in Newcastle University who’s studying Master in Music Performance used to say — is an anatomical cleft.

Freudian maybe.

But more because I was reading this book during my primary years — and the graphic narration in it — scarred me.

Yet, I cherished the small library of James Clavell historical fiction at home. Growing up with the book however is a different story. The word clef, stuck as cleft in my mind.

“…poor bastards not hungry, he’s starving…he’ll gorge like a ravenous wolf…vomit it up like as fast as a drunk-gluttoned whore…eat like an animal and vomit like an animal…Not in front of a piss-cutting sonofabitch — particularly one as cleaned minded as a pox-mucked whore’s cleft!”

It seem apropos as the night of International Women’s Day ended at Cloth & Clef.

Clef as the symbolism of womanhood — at least in this perverted mind of mine.

“…lazy bunch of black bastards…how does one wear this? She held up the…codpiece…he wears in front, like this…over his trousers…over his cod… she looked at the bosun’s (codpiece) studying it. He felt her look and stirred…You want a quickie?…a bunk in the next cabin. Send your friend aloft..I’ll pay the usual…piece of copper — even 3 if your like stoat, and you’ll straddle the best cock between here and Lisbon…”

At this point the ladies bodyguard who doesn’t understand English senses something wrong and intervenes by drawing sword. The bosun responds by drawing pistols.

“Go on, monkey, come at me, you stink-pissed shithead!…tell this monkey to put up his sword or he’ll be a headless sonofabitch before he can fart!…monkey faced bastard pulled a sword…”

Solidarity Walk will end at Cloth & Clef, Cangkat Bukit Bintang for our Ladies Rock The Night Gig hosted by Rina Omar with main performance by all female band from Malaysia The PIPS and Liyana Fizi. The night will also witness a special performance by a band from China: The Overdose. The Gig also features musical performance from Liyana Fizi, Maleena, Beeha, Diandra Arjunaidi, Siew Wai Kok with Yong Yandsen, and poetry by Alina Abdullah, Marini Rafar, Fazleena Hishamuddin & Illya Syahirah featuring Amira.

To summarize:

Female gig performer: lo-fi feel at the preliminary set, some cover song and the usual radio-friendly lovey-dovey song.

Diandra Arjunaidi the Orange

Beeha Yeeha

Liyana Jasmay! Eh, Fizi -- FORKUSTIK @ Annexe Gallery inside joke

Poetry: the local poet up the ante with the poetry slam. Elaine Foster was there too — as an audience. Two of the poetry revolved around heart-break and failed relationship — the girls are mad as a hatter, must be the mercurial emotion. They don’t spit odium — only hokum at the podium.

Men -- you suck!

Experimental music: Hmm, can’t quite stomach it, despite the avant-garde nature — that is if you like the sound of barfing, tweeting and broken saxophone for 12 minutes. What a waste of 12 minutes of recording time in my precious Canon 5dm2. Poor baby.

Man, you blow!

The Pips: the heart of the mosh pit. I’m your new fan — Dyson Air Multiplier™ Fan.

I’ve been a paid member of Amnesty International Malaysia since 2007. I’m not a volunteer that day. Just joining in for the sake of human right (and some noise at the gig) — Women’s Right are Human Right! (Hillary Clinton, Beijing, China: 5 September 1995).

Growing a pair of moobs and being a bra burner (I don’t wear one), qualified me as a bona fide participant.

Dina Zaman

Dina Zaman launched the event with Kartini (Tini) & Rafidah (Rafa) of 3R as the host. The other 3R host, Celina, is asleep. No, she’s being undercover for some crime investigation tv production. I’ve to google for the host name (three of them), since it’s been awhile I watch terrestrial tv — well, I hardly watch tv for the past 5 years. Did I ever watch 3R? Maybe a gist, mostly the commercial.

Tini & Rafa of 3R

Dina Zaman just arrived from Jakarta and had to leave early (with entourage from Marie Claire). Rafidah too had to leave for Penang that night for another International Women’s Day event at USM.

There’s a short speech by Dina Zaman as the police hovering around the perimeter, at one point, a police patrol car drove real slowly by the Arab Square — but not intimidating enough. The ambiance was electrifying even with the small crowd. Maybe it’s the static and the warm hot night.

Nora of Amnesty International Malaysia summarize the event and proceed with Solidarity Walk afterward to Cloth and Clef along Changkat Bukit Bintang.

But not after Rumah Anak Teater’s street theater skit: RAGUT — on snatch crime and marginalized sexy women that became the victim of opportunistic criminal. Sexy women is a victim too.

The Victim

This sexy woman is a victim too — of our tropical and global warm weather that’s shrinking the polar ice caps. And the trend is in tandem with the minimalist fashion sense.

Yes, it’s that hot (pun intended).

Rempit dude, who drives car in RAGUT

RAGUT, a street theater by Rumah Anak Teater held true to the intention of the event:

Women on a daily basis were forced to negotiate their fundamental rights to movement and personal security due to the climate of impunity, discrimination and lack of gender consideration in development issues.

Women continue to find themselves left out and be reminded that the Night is not a time for Women to be on the Street due to the risk of personal safety and violence. We choose to end this circle of Discrimination and the Culture of Fear that women are raised into and threatened by the possibility of violence to walk the streets at Night.

The rest of the night — is noise.

The Solidarity Walk is a whistle-blowing march towards the mosh pit of Cloth & Clef. We really annoyed those Indonesian makcik warung and Caucassian binge-drinker along the Changkat Bukit Bintang road.

Wow, I just proved that I’m not only sexist. I’m also a chauvinistic keris-welding Malay-Siamese-Arab-Yunnan-Chinese.

Take that #yorais!

I’ll change my mode now (this joke won’t get old — and getting old is never as old with #yorais).

Ignorance may be a misfortune, albeit a voluntary one, but vandals are a curse on the land no matter who they are or whatever their name. By their words and by their deeds they have blotted our landscape and despoiled our land, and now on a pile of rubble they are standing triumphant on the remains of what used to be a row of fine shop houses in Kedai Payang.

I max out the 16GB SanDisk Extreme IV CF that day — on HD video of the talks, Liyana Fizi and Beeha performance. No video for Meor Yusof and Nikbindijan since the preliminary seating I was at have a limited view of the stage. Then I changed my seating next to the guy who use Nikon DSLR and bounce flash every picture he took — which is quite annoying. I’ve to put on the lens hood for my 135mm f/2 to deflect the flash.

Word of advice: crank up the ISO, play with the available light. It’s not that dark in there! And you’re 3-5 meter away with 10 meter high ceiling.

Nadia artwork is there. Who is a friend of my Flickr contact list: Daniel, strobist and available light experimenter. Her artwork usually in monochrome and tell the gritty urbanism and the derelict outpost of modernism. Showcase at the gallery is her usual trademark — dark and voyeuristic.